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Tuesday, 22 January 2013

And then there were two...

Good day to you all out there in elections land. Seeing as how I've been living in Toronto on and off for a year now, it was decided that I should make a new website to complement my existing Québec Projections page. Most of all I've noticed a gap in the coverage out there, and I hope to fill it on this website, while learning a thing or two about people, Ontario, and the numbers that help make sense of them both.

Ontario's elections are run and overseen by the intuitively-named Elections Ontario (whereas Québec's elections agency is more commonly known as the DGEQ). I have been compiling data from the Elections Ontario - Tools website, and getting to know the ridings. What the Elections Ontario site lacks in charm it makes up for in straightforwardness. Finding the data was much easier than on the DGEQ website. The data we're interested in is contained within the file called "Summary of Valid Votes Cast for Each Candidate 2011". which contains a rather straightforward list of the candidates, their party, the total votes and the percentage of valid votes received.

Of course, that's only half the story. We'll also be digging around to find the socio-economic data, so we can twist it out of proportion and make all sorts of scurrilous correlations, such as "Candy-bar eaters are 5% more likely to vote for the Evil Party." and so on.